


the wretched ones

by glycerineclown



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Communication, Cunnilingus, F/M, Post-Season 2, THIS SHIP IS AN EMOTIONAL HELLSCAPE, and can you tell i was almost a journalist cuz i can, and there is a metric ton of This Will Never Work angst, definitely spoilers for the end of Season 2, in which karen page tries and fails to plan a seduction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 17:38:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6433951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glycerineclown/pseuds/glycerineclown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank’s been laying low, keeping his head down. If he was handsome bloody and beaten—he still smells like gun oil and smoke, he holds himself the same way, but god, Karen can feel her heart rate pick up from just looking at him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wretched ones

**Author's Note:**

> **Immediate spoilers for the end of season two.** References to canon-typical violence.

It takes Karen weeks of digging before she admits that she can’t prove Schoonover was the Blacksmith. She can’t exactly print that he heavily implied it before he held her at gunpoint. And that afterward the Punisher, who’s not really dead, executed him in a shed. 

His body hasn’t even been found.

She does write about the undercover cop, however, as part of the two-part profile on Frank, and blows the carousel massacre wide open. The web edition of the article goes viral, at least locally, and she gets a wide variety of emails and phone calls about it, some upset that she’s speaking ill of the dead, D.A. Samantha Reyes included.

When they connect the dots, that she was on Frank Castle’s legal team, that she escaped the room where Reyes was gunned down, everyone starts questioning Karen’s intentions. _Don’t read the comments._ Mitchell keeps poking his head into her office to watch her squirm under the pressure.

Karen gets home late almost every night these days. Nelson & Murdock wasn’t bad training for a journalist’s seriously fucked up sleep schedule. At least she doesn’t have to dress for a law office anymore.

She turns the deadbolt, tosses her mail and keys onto the counter.

There’s a flicker of orange behind her window, a dark figure clanks a little on the fire escape, and Karen freezes, grips her bag, ready to go for the gun. She has one that’s registered to her now, and a concealed carry permit.

But she knows that profile, and she breathes out. It’s just Frank, as much as Frank Castle can be ‘just’ anyone, smoking a cigarette on the steps.

Karen crosses the room in quick strides, flips the latch and shoves open the glass.

“I swear to god, Frank,” she says irritably, and pulls him inside. “Where’ve you been?”

He tosses his cig out the window behind him. “Around. Everything alright?”

Karen just presses her lips together and wraps her arms around him. He feels his mouth quirk up on one side as he returns the hug, and presses his cheek against the top of her head.

“I’ve missed you,” she says into his chest, and pulls back to turn on a lamp. “You’re smoking now?”

“Old habits,” he says, closing the window. “It’s a good excuse, if someone asks what I’m doing outside.”

She turns to him again, surveys the damage—the bruises are gone, she can finally see his face. Frank doesn’t have a good history of passive responses to strangers, so she won’t push him on the cigarettes.

As if she doesn’t also like things that can kill her.

“The car still running good? You could have gotten a better one.”

Karen nods. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

Ten grand in cash for a new sedan had appeared in her mailbox—he’d totaled Ben’s, and insisted on replacing it. She couldn’t exactly say no on her salary from the Bulletin. She saved just over half the money for rent—she can barely keep the lights on.

The car she got off Craigslist is early-2000s, with better A/C, and still has a tape deck.

Frank’s been laying low, keeping his head down. The Blacksmith was the last piece, at least for his immediate personal vendetta. If Frank was handsome bloody and beaten—he still smells like gun oil and smoke, he holds himself the same way, but god, Karen can feel her heart rate pick up from just looking at him.

Everything about his physicality would be threatening, terrifying on someone else—especially if she had met him a year or two ago. He could break her in a second.

But he won’t.

She can hear that, his devotion to making her feel secure, in every word he says to her, to the tone he uses, feel that in his expressions. He has a way about him that makes it clear how many genuinely good relationships he’s had with women. It’s not a turn-off, not at all.

He cocks his head to the side, watches her take her coat off and toss it over the back of a chair. “You still jonesing to be the next Truman Capote, ma’am?”

Karen rolls her eyes. “If only my key source wasn’t officially dead, huh.”

 

The first time Frank just _showed up_ inside Karen’s apartment at night was also the last, because she maced him in the face—which was shitty for several reasons, one of which was that she had just bought new stuff for her apartment that wasn’t riddled with bullet holes.

The stink of it hung around for almost a week. He left her a fan and some cold cream, and didn’t show his face again until after she’d had her first byline printed in the Bulletin.

It’s not like clockwork by any means, sometimes there’s a week or two between visits—Frank will wait for her to get home, and then use the fire escape or take the stairs up from the basement and knock on her front door. He’s a sniper; he knows damn well how to watch from afar, and Karen is, understandably, too paranoid to appreciate anyone being in her space without her there. If she notices him tailing her when she’s walking alone at night, it’s only because he’s obvious enough.

He’s never obvious, but she still looks up, scans the rooftops for him.

She worries every day about him being found out—partially because she’d be completely implicated, but also because Frank’s still just walking around Hell’s Kitchen. Sure, he’s mostly nocturnal, and he owns a hat, but it’s only a matter of time.

He listens to the police scanner for hours on end, and they think he’s dead. At least if they were ever tipped off, he’d have a head start that way.

He lets the crew cut grow out, lets his beard come in to change his face, but he’s distinctive regardless. There are still photos of him everywhere, and the ones from the military show him without the bruises he had at trial.

He should really leave the city. He should really leave Karen the fuck alone. Matt sure thinks so, and he’s had more than one broody grunt-fest with Frank on a dark rooftop about it.

But instead, as the weeks stretch to months, into the spring, he might even relax, at least in her apartment—a bizarre state for a man with so much constant vigilance. He actually falls asleep on her couch a couple of times while she’s writing, but never for more than an hour or two.

He needs a new mission.

They run into each other at a hardware store—she’s picking up light bulbs, him duct tape—and they get coffee next door afterward, and drink it on the sidewalk like he’s not dead, like he doesn’t skulk around her building at night.

He asks good questions about her articles and offers to paint over the drywall.

 

Frank hasn’t kissed her yet.

And she knows how much he’s lost, how much he’s still hurting—but she can’t figure out why they keep having dinner and talking past midnight if he isn’t ready for anything new. Those aren’t the actions of a man who’s emotionally unavailable to anyone he’s not mourning.

It doesn’t help that Karen’s been thinking about having sex with him ever since the trial. About getting that furious machine of a man to bury his face between her legs. About riding him, and sucking his cock, and letting him hold her down.

He’s always worried about what she’ll think of him, he learns quickly, he’s observant—he’d be a great lover.

She can feel his eyes on her when they’re together. Sometimes he shows up with takeout, and they sit across from each other at the rickety table in her kitchen.

He always helps with the dishes. He doesn’t stay the night.

Maybe he’s waiting for her to make the first move. Or maybe he doesn’t think he deserves to be loved anymore. But clearly he liked being married, he can do domestic, he wants to provide. He never drinks more than a beer or two in front of her. He stitches himself up elsewhere.

When she tells him about Wesley, he listens and nods, tells her she’s justified, and that he deserved it.

Karen’s never felt like he needed to make anything up to her—maybe the car, maybe the hospital with Grotto and definitely the diner, but all that has long been even as far as she’s concerned. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t hate himself, though, that he isn’t still carrying around many lives’ worth of baggage.

Things have been over with Matt for a long time, and Frank knows that. She’s going to have to be the one who initiates.

She buys a pack of condoms the next day, when she’s out getting her meager groceries. Call her confident.

 

When Frank comes to the door a few nights later, she greets him with a kiss on the cheek, lets her hands linger after she pulls him inside. She backs him up against a wall, steps in until her feet are almost between his. He doesn’t move out of her way.

“What’re you doing?” he asks, his eyebrows quirking at her, even as his hands slide around her waist perfectly.

“You said that when I have something, I should hold on with both hands.”

His fingers flex, just below her ribcage. “Didn’t mean me.”

She looks up at him, steels herself for rejection, because fuck it. “ _I_ mean you.”

He sighs, but he’s still touching her. “Karen—”

She shakes her head. “Stop it. I want you to fuck me.”

He meets her eyes then, wide open, and wets his lips. He stares at her for longer than usual, her heart pounding in her chest, but the seconds pass in slow-motion in front of her, the way his eyes drop to her lips and come back up, the hitch in his breath. One of his hands trails up to her neck.

Karen wants to say, _don’t make me beg,_ and _don’t say you’re not good enough,_ and _please_.

Frank’s fingers at her neck tuck over her cheek, into her hair.

Finally, he says, “You know I can’t do that.”

“No, I don’t know that,” she says, shaking her head again. “Frank—”

“I wish you hadn’t asked me for that,” he interrupts, pulling his hands back from her. “I can’t do that. I’ve got work to do.” He steps to the side, towards the door.

“But,” she starts, and doesn’t continue when she sees his face, the set of his mouth in a cold snarl.

“I said no, Karen. M’sorry.”

He doesn’t slam the door in her face. He just closes it behind him without another word.

It takes her an hour to get off the floor by her door.

 

Frank leaves a voicemail on her burner phone a day later while she’s at work—he’ll be upstate for a few days, tells her to take care of herself.

Karen tries really hard to not parse that, and fails miserably. Either she’s been insensitive to his loss or completely clueless about what he wants from her or he’s just a fucking asshole.

A fucking asshole with business to finish upstate and really bad timing.

She buries herself in research and sleeps at the office that night. Wakes up, lines up interviews, transcribes audio files for the best quotes, and makes calls to sources in Washington, D.C. and Chicago and Jersey. Stares at Microsoft Word for hours on end. Wonders if Frank stole a different truck to leave town. Sends fifteen emails in an afternoon for one story.

Mitchell put her on the crime beat, so she attends police press conferences and spends more time sneaking around taped-off bloodshed than she did before. What she’s learned about guns and devastation from Frank cause autopsies and official reports to make more sense, but also raise a lot of questions that people don’t like answering.

There’s always another murder in New York these days. Always another loophole.

It’s stressful, but it’s the kind of stress she can do something about. She can give it to the public, not as fear-mongering, but information. She even gets the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen himself to give her a quote—Karen might actually be the first reporter to do so—and then she leaves before he can grill her again about what’s up with her and Frank.

She has lunch with Foggy, gets an earful about the cases he’s working on, and meets his new boss, a sharp, no-nonsense woman, with a beautiful office and serious personal drama, if Foggy’s to be believed.

There’s a lot to do, and always a deadline. She really doesn’t have time to worry about getting rejected by a mass murderer.

But who’s she kidding, right?

 

Frank comes back, a week after his voicemail.

She gets home to find him sitting in the hallway outside her door. There’s a duffel bag and an empty cup of coffee beside him.

He gets to his feet as she’s rearranging the files in her arms and pulling her keys out of her purse. She unlocks the door with her back to him.

“Can we talk?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Karen replies, shoving the door open and walking inside.

Frank shuffles his feet. The door’s still wide open, so he steps into the doorway, leans against the jamb.

Karen’s standing at her desk, swinging her bag to the floor and organizing the papers in front of her.

“I need to apologize to you,” he says, and when she looks up, he’s got his eyes trained on the ground.

Karen tucks her hair behind her ear. “Close the door if you’re coming in.”

He grabs his bag from the hallway and does so. He sets it on the floor and walks toward her, leans against the wall next to her desk. He watches Karen’s mouth screw up, her hand moving to cover it, before she shakes her head and speaks.

“I’m sorry about the other night, Frank, I really just sprang that on you, I didn’t think—”

“I wanted to,” Frank says, cutting her off. “I did. We’ve been kind of playing house here, and that’s not fair to you. I’ve been so selfish, showing up here, and I just... I got scared.”

Karen frowns, and sits on the edge of her desk. “What scared you?”

“I need you to understand something,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “My hair, this beard, every time I look in the mirror it doesn’t look right, it’s not regulation. But I’m doing it because the only way I can stay in New York and not get you killed is if the rest of the world thinks I’m dead. Either that or I can go back to prison—I’d thrive there, become my worst self. I had every intention of being punished for my crimes, Karen. And then you showed up.”

“I don’t—I’m sorry—” she says. Karen looks away, her eyes shining.

“Don’t you do that,” he says, sharply, shaking his head. “Don’t you apologize for that, it’s my fault. You’re the last good thing I’ve got, and—it doesn’t even matter if you want to see me, I shouldn’t be in your life. That’s all on me.”

Karen lets out a shaky breath and sniffs, and as much as she wants to argue, there’s nothing she can say.

“The other night, Karen—I thought that was a line I couldn’t cross with you, as if it would be so much more dangerous than our usual routine. It’s not even to do with Maria, not really. Everyone I love dies bloody.”

The implication there holds on tight, and Frank’s got his eyes right on her. She stands, and steps forward, until she could touch him.

“I’m pretty sure we’ve been in too deep from the start, Frank. I can’t regret you.” Karen reaches up, cards her fingers into his hair, and Frank closes his eyes, leaning into her touch. “What does that mean for us?”

He sighs, and presses a kiss to her hand. “It means, I don’t want you to ever feel obligated to me, but if you really feel like torturing yourself further, we can have sex, if that’s what you want. But it’s not going to hurt any less when this ends badly. We do this, we can’t get sloppy. Can’t forget what’s really happening.”

She lets herself nod—she’s made her bed. “I’ve found I’m a bit of a masochist that way.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Frank leans in, and kisses her on the forehead before he leaves.

 

Karen ends up only having to wait until the next night—he’s at the front door again, holding a carnation.

She grins at the flower when he hands it to her, and locks the door behind them.

“You smell good,” she says, as she backs him up against the wall.

His mouth twists into a smirk. “What do you want, girl?”

“You know what I want.”

“Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head at her. “I wanna hear you say it.”

Karen sighs, and pulls his hands to her waist, where they were last time the two of them were standing here. Frank’s eyebrows raise, waiting. He resettles his weight against the wall, so they’re closer in height.

She bites her lip and snorts at him. “Ugh, god, this is the worst. Last time I thought being direct would be the best play.”

“Well, clearly that didn’t work.”

When he leans down and kisses her, his rough fingers curl in her hair. He presses in with his chapped mouth, and when she wraps her arms around his neck, he changes the angle, brings his hands back down to the small of her back.

He slips her the tongue, pulls her lower lip into his mouth in a way that makes her whimper.

She breaks from him, panting a little. “I knew you’d be good at this.”

“Thought long and hard about it, huh?”

Frank steps to the side, shrugs out of his jacket, and removes his gun, as well as a long knife from his belt. He leaves them on the floor, and extends a hand to her. Karen goes to him, slides her hand into his.

He leads her to the middle of the apartment and clears his throat. “Where do you want me?”

Karen smiles, and indicates the bed, pushing him gently towards it until he’s sitting on the edge of the mattress.  “Boots off,” she says, and he leans down, unlacing and pulling at the left one until it tumbles heavily to the floor.

She steps back from him and goes to unzip her skirt, when she sees him start, his hands twitching on his other boot. She pauses, holds his gaze until both of his boots are off. Grinning slyly at him, Karen sways closer, lets his hands come up to drag the zipper down and tug at her skirt until it drops to her ankles.

Karen steps out of the fabric and lays it out flat. When she turns back to Frank, his eyes have glazed over a little. She puts a knee onto the bed and straddles him.

Frank’s hands meet her skin immediately, sliding up her thighs, digging into her ass. She gasps into his mouth when he kisses her, and rocks back against his hold and the rough fabric of his jeans.

When she tugs at his shirt, he pulls it free of his waistband and over his head.

She’s seen his scars before—some old and many, many of them newer, still red even if they’re angry lines instead of fresh wounds. He’s got enough hair to hold onto, and she grips it, directs his face to her chest. Pushing the open collar of her blouse aside with his nose, he drags his teeth across her skin and kisses there, before popping a button.

He meets her eyes again and his hands pause at the next button, looking for permission.

Karen just smiles at him, kisses him again, and soon her blouse is open, hanging down her back and around her elbows, and she strips it off.

Her bra opens in the front, and she lets it join her top on the floor. Frank groans, his hands filling with her, thumbing over her nipples.

“Fuck, Karen.”

She exhales hard, chuckling at him through their kiss as she goes for his belt buckle, sliding it free of his jeans.

Frank’s hands slide under her ass again, and he stands, turns before she can get a good grip on him, and deposits Karen onto her bed.

Karen tugs a pillow under her head, watching him shuck off his jeans. She spreads her legs and beckons to him with her finger as he’s stepping out of them, makes grabby hands as he climbs onto the bed.

His rough hands smooth over Karen’s skin, and she can see the bulge in his boxer-briefs before she feels it against her hip.

Humming, she bares her neck for him until he latches on. Her fingernails scrape across Frank’s back and he works his way down her body, twists one of her nipples gently, sucks the other into his mouth—she wraps her arms around him and holds on.

“You’re so goddamn beautiful,” he says against her skin, and slides his hands up the insides of her thighs, lets his middle finger duck beneath her panties and part the lips of her pussy.

Karen rocks her hips up against his touch, and he breaks contact—but before she can voice complaint, he’s dragging the thin cotton down her thighs.

“Already so wet for me, Miss Page,” he says, as he tosses them behind him.

He climbs off the bed, tugs her by the hips to the edge of it, and gets on his knees. 

She grins as Frank tucks one of her legs over his shoulder and smirks up at her. He bites gently at the inside of her thighs, kissing over the faint marks he leaves—before she spurs him on with a soft “Harder,” and he sinks his teeth in.

She moans as he slides a finger inside her and finds the edge of her clit with his tongue.

His answering groan into her pussy gets permanently branded in her brain for later. He eats her out for the next fifteen, if the clock on her bedside table is anything to go by, until her legs are shaking with it, until he has three fingers fucking into her, until she’s grinding on his face.

When she comes it’s with a long, shuddering gasp and fists in his hair.

“Jesus Christ, Frank,” she sighs, as he falls back onto the mattress next to her, his face shiny and wet. He rubs his nose against her shoulder and pulls on the edge of the sheet to wipe his mouth.

Karen moves up the bed to Frank’s side, and rolls over, kissing him, palming over his dick. “Your turn.”

His underwear gets kicked across the room and her hand joins his, pulling his foreskin down around the head of his cock. Karen thumbs over his slit, and he moans, licking his lips, tucking her hair behind her ear.

“Tell me what you want me to do to you,” Frank says, a little breathlessly.

She smiles, her embarrassment gone this time. “I want you to fuck me.”

She presses a kiss to the base of his dick and gets up to fish a condom out of the box in her dresser, and tosses one onto the bed next to his knee.

When she returns, it’s to straddle him again, to rub herself up the line of his dick. He grunts absently, his hands squeezing her thighs, before he feels around for the condom and opens it.

They roll it down his cock together, and hold him up straight so that she can sink down. Karen goes slow, watches his face—his mouth opens wider and his head tips back as she gets down to the root. Frank curses under his breath, bending his knees to get his feet under him for leverage.

She loves having his hands on her thighs almost as much as he seems to love putting them there. “Hold on to me,” she says, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I wanna see your fingerprints tomorrow.”

He smiles up at her, and follows through.

 

Frank’s not there when she wakes up, but she didn’t expect him to be.

He left a note, though, ripped from a pad of paper on her desk— _THURSDAY? PIZZA OR THAI?_

 

It’ll end with tears and blood, but she’s prepared for it. She’ll go down swinging.


End file.
